A Girl and a Gun

NOVEMBER 2004
Bad Education
Days of Being Wild
In the Mood for Love
The Motorcycle Diaries
The Big Red One
The Conversation

Bad Education (2004)--11/28/04
Pedro Almodóvar, the fabulously gifted Spaniard, seems to leap effortlessly from one Himalayan peak to the next highest and then the next highest still. He has been making films for thirty years, although he only came to notice in this country in 1990 with Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, the success of which scared up distributors for films made since and before. The last three have been stunning: All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002), and now Bad Education. I thought Talk to Her was about as perfect a film as a person could make, and besides the many respects in which it excelled, it was one of the finest looking films I had seen in years—the best, in fact, until Bad Education, which is a visual marvel.
It’s a story involving a good deal of gay male sex, artfully simulated, but goes far beyond sex into duplicity, deception, exploitation, and revenge. Shifting between memories of youth, contemporary scenes (1980), and visualizations of one of the character’s short stories, Almodóvar works some interesting changes from one to the other. Beyond that, into sorting out the nesting-dolls plot, ruins half the fun of the film, so I’m going to stop there on narrative. But I can’t help praising his of how to present a scene with economy and verve, getting the effects he wants out of each one with pounding on you or being coyly elusive. The man is a master of balance and good directorial judgment. He also gets as much out of actors as anyone making films today. Gael García Bernal and Fele Martínez are the highly capable leads, but each part is cast and played in a way that makes you think nobody else but the performer cast could possibly have handled the role.
Do not miss this one.

Chungking Express (1996)--11/26/2004
Wong Kar-Wai again; this time it's Chungking Express (1996, available on DVD). Everything of Wong’s I’ve seen thus far is about longing, romantic yearning, trying and never succeeding in satisfying a deep need. Here, he treats it as comedy, and it turns out he has a lovely, light touch. It’s an oddly structured film, and if you like a-to-z narrative, you might want to go elsewhere. It opens with a young plainclothes policeman in Hong Kong 1995, a man named Qiwi who’s broken up with his girlfriend, aches for her, but can’t quite work out how he’s going to get back together. In the meantime, he runs down two-bit street punks and keeps an eye out for other women. He also runs, around a local athletic field, on the theory that sweating reduces his body fluids and leaves nothing left for crying—except that when he runs, the rain starts sheeting down, so that while he’s trying to fight off tears, the very heavens are crying. Meanwhile, we also pick up on the story of a Chinese woman in a dreadful blond wig and dark sunglasses who’s setting up a bunch of south Asians to act as mules for a big drug smuggling operation. When a competitor steals her work force and product, she starts packing and eventually mows down his muscle and him. But her path crosses Qiwi, who falls for her because he has to have someone, brazens through her rejection, and ends up cleaning her rain-splattered shoes with his necktie. Qiwi, beautifully played by Takeshi Kaneshiro, is a loopy fellow, utterly unplugged from reality, so befuddled by his loneliness and need that he has no clue he’s trying to court a big-time doper and killer.
Then, abruptly—but really, what more was there to say?—we leave him for a uniformed police officer known only as Officer 633, who gets his takeout at the same fast food place, Chungking Express, as Qiwi (although they never meet). He has a flight attendant girlfriend, gorgeous and pneumatic, so it’s a fair bet she’s going to leave him, which she does. He goes into a long funk, but at the takeout place he meets a worker, Faye. She seems terrified by his interest, and unable to express her own. By believable coincidence, she falls into possession of a key to his nearby apartment, which she begins visiting during his absence—cleaning, playing with his tschotskes, fantasizing, sometimes barely getting out before he returns. When 633 is there alone, he talks to a stuffed animal, even to a dishtowel (when it’s wet, he sympathizes, thinking it was crying). He finally catches her, then makes a direct approach: let’s have a date. You don’t think it will go well, do you? But that’s not the end, and even the end isn’t the end. The estimable Tony Leung plays 633, but the real presence here is the flaky, funny Faye Wong as the girl. For all her antics, we never doubt that she’s hiding a vast loneliness of her own, and we’re pulling for both of them.
The two pieces of this story, a pair of men whose functional abilities are compromised by their needs, but compromised in funny ways, stand up well enough as romantic comedy, but like so much of his work, they’re films based on texture, moment, mood. It doesn’t matter where they go anywhere near as much as what happens along the way, which is a defensible metaphor for life, if you think about it.

Days of Being Wild (1990)--11/25/04
In the Mood for Love (2000)--11/24/04
I set myself up for the New York premiere of Wong Kar-Wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990) with the DVD of his masterful In the Mood for Love (2000). It was a somewhat overwhelming experience. This guy has all the moves, and it’s hard for me to imagine anyone who is not both dazzled and deeply touched by his work. Wong was born in mainland China in 1960 and emigrated to Hong Kong at the age of five. There, he was immersed in the so-called Shanghai-nese community of Mandarin-speaking first generation immigrants and didn’t learn Cantonese until he was thirteen. (He now speaks both dialects and pretty good English.) But his experiences of the city in the ‘60s made an indelible impression, and he returns to them in both of these films. Wong did not go to film school, or rather his film school was the Mandarin-subtitled movie houses of his youth, showing Chinese, Japanese, European, and American films. He freely acknowledges all manner of influences, and critics like to point out a certain kinship with early Godard, but the fact is that Wong’s approach is all his own.
Days of Being Wild (1991) is set in 1960 and centers upon the womanizing Yuddy, played by the late Leslie Cheung. He seduces, indeed entrances, Lizhen (Maggie Cheung), drops her, replaces her with Fung-Ling (Carina Lau), while Lizhen drifts into the orbit of a shy cop (Andy Lau). In time, we learn that Yuddy’s emotional emptiness is attributable to the void in him created by his biological mother, who upon his birth paid a Chinese woman fifth dollars American per month to bring him up and never saw him again. Yuddy wants desperately to find out who she is and see her, make her look at him, and that quest relegates the women he has made emotionally (and sexually) dependent on him irrelevant in his life.
That’s the story, and yet it’s not. Wong has some interest, but not much, in telling a to z narratives. He’s interested in textures, images, moments; he gets at emotional depths through visible surfaces, and if you said that you remember the movie like a time-lapse photography slide show, he’d probably smile with pleasure. (It’s hard not to recall the postcard sequence in Godard’s Les Carabiniers [1963], but that’s another story.) There is narrative sense to his work, but it’s only one dimension. His visual objectives are achieved with great mastery, some of which are surely attributable to the Australian (and Mandarin-fluent) cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who worked with Wong for the first time on Days.
The film concludes in characteristic fashion, with some brief scenes containing very little dialogue, visiting each of the (surviving) main characters, or places they have frequented. They briefly and powerfully depict lost chances, dead-end lives, people who think they’re starting over but are in fact stepping onto a treadmill.
In the Mood for Love is perhaps better known here, because it received US distribution and because there is a terrific Criterion DVD including some deleted scenes, a very helpful analysis of Hong Kong culture in the 1960s, a bio and a couple of filmed interviews with Wong. (As good as the DVD is, if you get a chance to see the film on a theater screen, pounce: it gives much more elbow room for the color, the movement of the characters, and effects like Wong and Doyle’s ever-present rain to operate.) It’s a dense, tightly woven film, even more reliant on images, and with amazingly little dialogue. Instead, we get the camera, the faces and gestures of the performers, and the music—the music!—creating the mood for us.
Mrs. Chow (Maggie Leung) takes a room for herself and her husband, a businessman who is constantly traveling, in a rooming house. At the same time, Mr. Chan (the brilliant Tony Leung) takes a nearby room in the same rooming house for himself and his wife, who works at part-time jobs at irregular hours to supplement his meager salary as a journalist. We never see these two spouses, although we hear them once. As they go about their lives, Mr. Chan and Mrs. Chow find their paths intersecting—in the hallway, in the local noodle shop, in the apartment of the landlady and her family. Over time, they understand that their spouses are having an affair. They comfort one another, become friendly, are attracted to one another, but when they explore tentatively the possibility of taking that farther, they—and especially she—cannot. Mrs. Chow in particular is blocked by a sense of obligation, a fear of being abandoned and alone, of the shame and disrespect that will descend upon her if she leaves her husband. The closest she can get to taking the step is to “rehearse” the conversation she would have with her husband, but the very fact of rehearsal demonstrates to her how unprepared she is for such a radical break.
I simply do not have the ability to convey the subtlety and effectiveness with which Wong brings us into their inner lives; I can only say, see for yourselves and be stunned at how deeply you feel their feelings. All of this is aided by Doyle’s astounding camera work (here aided by Lee Pin-Bing, who had to step in when shooting well over schedule and Doyle had to leave for a prior commitment) and that music. It ranges from the central theme, a waltz borrowed from another Chinese movie, as freely acknowledged by Wong, some pieces from Chinese opera, and Nat King Cole singing some ballads in Spanish. (Cole was very popular in Hong Kong in the 1960s, and most of the dance bands were Filipino, which meant they brought along a Latin influence.) All the music is hypnotic, addictive, perfect.
Again, this account is radically truncated. I am told that there is a great deal of verbal play with the Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking populations, teasing about accents, puns on the two dialects. The whole noodle shop business is more than a device to get the principals in one another’s company. Mrs. Chow sets off for the shop carrying a sort of thermos, her own personal carry-out container, which suggests not only that she spends a lot of evenings alone, but also symbolizes the erosion of traditional female roles as wife and mother; she is now increasingly independent, a working woman, fending for herself—but not quite able to be entirely free of the old roles. Food in general is used throughout the film to make cultural and historical comments best followed through the Criterion DVD’s extra on Hong Kong in the 1960s.
While Wong was making Mood, he also started his next film, 2046, using some of the same cast and in fact a sort of sequel in certain ways. That film is now finished; it made a smash and won some acting awards at Cannes, then opened in Paris on the day I had to leave town in October. As of this writing, it does not yet have a US distributor, which I find inexplicable and unjustifiable.

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)--11/19/04
As long as Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries, about an episode in the youthful life of Che Guevara, stays within the (entirely viable) buddy picture genre, it seems surefooted and cleareyed. When it drifts over into the biopic genre, it gets a bit wobbly. Fortunately, most of the film is in the buddy groove, and as that it’s plenty enjoyable. Guevara, then twenty-three, and his pal Alberto Granado take off from their native Buenos Aires in January 1952 to cover the length, if not exactly the breadth of “America”—i.e. what we call South America—by an ancient motorcycle. There’s friendship, growing understanding, blowups aplenty, reconciliations. Guevara, then known by the nickname of Fuser, was a medical student and not discernibly political; Granado was a graduate in biochemistry and mostly interested in women, fun, and adventure. He is the older pal initiating the younger one into some of the realities of life, such as the need to be deceptive, even duplicitous, on occasion, something Ernesto resists, then accepts, gets fairly good at, then discards for disarming candor. After a stop at the sprawling estate of a rich girlfriend of Ernesto’s, when it’s clear (if not to him, then to us) that she’s not going to wait for him while he takes off on this lark of several months and even if she did her parents wouldn’t permit the relationship, they’re on their way.
As in all buddy movies (see my thoughts on Sideways above), the real juice comes from the chemistry between the two guys, and here it’s terrific. The currently red-hot Gael García Bernal (he stars in Almodovar’s new film, Bad Education), who looks alarmingly like the young Alain Delon, is very good in a largely quiet, shy part written by Jose Rivera (from the diaries kept by Guevara and Granado), the sort of stance just right for a twenty-three-year old who turns twenty-four at the end in a coming-of-age sequence. But the man who makes the pairing work, really work, is Rodrigo de la Serna as Granado, a man who bursts with life, contradictions, joy, and on top of it all is a terrific dancer and pulls off one of the greatest flirtation/seduction scenes with a pair of sisters you’ll ever see.
Ah, yes, but of course we know who Ernesto became, and Salles has to point the movie to that end. I have not read the original Diaries, and for all I know all the scenes the movie represents are true. They just don’t play true. The biopic leanings of Salles’s work just undermine everything: Ernesto’s heart being broken by a husband and wife who are poor miners, by a peasant forced off his land, by more peasants on a scow towed down the Amazon behind the steamer on which “respectable” people ride, by the patients in a leper’s colony where the two men work for three weeks. All of this compressed channeling of Ernesto’s conscience toward the revolutionary career he eventually assumed becomes hard to swallow; it’s too fast, too neat, and rather too sentimentalized. Look, the guy may have learned something on this trip, something which changed him, but I’ll bet anything it took a long time to seep in,. At least this stuff, which clangs against the soul of the movie, is pretty confined compared to the great trip and interplay.
A last note. Looking back over reviews of the film when it came out some six weeks ago or more, I find some truly obnoxious bile spewing from certain keyboards (I mention Roger Ebert and Paul Berman, the notorious liberal hawk, in particular). Their objection is that the film sympathetically treats a man with “authoritarian” political views, a man who had the effrontery to want to destroy United States world dominance. The film, of course, stops well short of Guevara’s revolutionary career, but on the theory that the child is father to the man, these critics bull forward. The fact that South America has been virtually a US dependency for the last 180 years, since the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine, is waved aside. Guevara lined up with Fidel and against us. End of case. Such critics are politically numbskulled in the worst way, but they also have no way to evaluate movies which touch on political subjects except by their own political prejudices. Which, if you’re going to have prejudices, are the wrong ones to have.

The Big Red One (1984; 2004 revised)--11/16/04
It was gratifying to see the generally welcoming response to Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980; 2004), a film he first brought in at just over four hours to the highly restrained amusement of the money people, who cut it in more than half and watched it sink in the marketplace. As you probably know by now, Fuller fought in 1942-45 with the First Infantry from North Africa through Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium, and Germany, and this was his effort to capture the central experience in his life in a way that memorialized it without sentimentalizing it. You can find out about his combat experiences, his making of this film and many others, and his hope that he would get a chance to reconstruct it before he died in The Third Face, his thoroughly entertaining autobiography. Fuller died in 1997. Now a team of restorers and film historians, with Richard Schickel at the helm, has added forty minutes of found footage to the picture, and it’s inestimably improved, although old Sam might still grumble about the eighty minutes apparently lost forever.
Fuller was twenty-nine when he joined up, and well into a career as a cityside reporter (he would have spat at the term “journalist”) for a New York City tabloid. He said, famously, that of course he was going to volunteer, since the war was going to be the biggest crime story in history. Now that Fuller is safely dead, reviewers can tut-tut about the film’s butchering by the suits and quietly applaud Fuller for his “life-affirming” work. Many of them have noted that his direct, even blunt style was a reflection of his tabloid roots, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker going so far as to suggest that he was the Weegee of the cinema. (Lane also expressed grave reservations about a tiny slice of a scene in which the soldiers deliver a woman’s baby on the floor of a German tank. That particular slice did not appear in the cut of the film being shown in New York. Did it appear anywhere?) That’s an easy connection to make, and not entirely wrong, but most of them simply left matters there.
In truth, Fuller’s camera here, and in much of his lesser work, was fabulously fluid and imaginative without being intrusive. His set-ups don’t simply go for a sock in the gut, a quick and easy message, but often for multiple perspectives on a scene, seeing it so thoroughly that you feel like you’re in the middle of it. He is also terrific at choreographing action; the scene in which the squad picks off six or eight Germans who wander into a cave where they’re hiding is masterfully compact, a kind of ballet called “Ambush.” By good editing and understanding how to move around in a scene, he’s able to create the illusion of a big battle’s chaos and inescapable fear while commanding only the tiniest fraction of what Big Steve had on hand for Saving Private Ryan. He’s pretty good with actors, too, and the young men who form the nucleus of his squad are a couple of cuts above the ordinary war film grunt (although he can do nothing with Mark Hamill, a—then—young man who was sadly not graced with one cell of acting talent). Robert Carradine is fine as the cigar-chewing Fuller alter ego, although Fuller also has a short appearance of his own as a combat cameraman. Lee Marvin, I suspect, presumed he had little need of direction, and on the basis of his performance, I would say he was right.
Best of all, of course, is that Fuller utterly refuses to kitsch up the film. People have noticed that while Spielberg’s opening sequence raised the bar of realism, he then proceeded to smear treacle all over his film. Fuller has too much respect, and contempt, for war to do that. He understands perfectly well, because he was there, that the only achievement in a war is survival. His vision rewards a look, even—especially—if you saw it twenty-four years ago.

The Conversation (1974)--11//15/04
After spending some time in the company of film editor Walter Murch (see November 10, main page), I sat down with The Conversation (1974), the first time I had seen it in thirty years. It’s a sharp little thriller, heavily influenced by both Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and the Watergate atmosphere of the early 1970s. The opening sequence in San Francisco’s Union Square is a marvel of visual storytelling, conveying an extraordinary amount of information with great economy. Francis Ford Coppola, who wrote and directed, also created enough dimensions to his central characters, to open up possibilities that would not have existed in a purely genre film. Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul is a legendary figure in the surveillance industry who has his apartment lock picked, his secret telephone number discovered, a private conversation recorded by another snoop, so it’s not surprising when Harry becomes the hunted, not the hunter. The CD’s extras include interviews with Coppola and Murch, which raise the interesting question about which scenes are real and which imagined. If you haven’t seen The Conversation, or just haven’t seen it in a while, I think you’d find it worth another look.

OCTOBER 2004
Safe
Sideways
Moolaadé
Undertow
Vera Drake
The Anatomy of Hell
I Heart Huckabees
The Brown Bunny
Shanghai Gesture
Uncovered
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
Modigliani
I Married a Watch
It Happened Tomorrow
And Then There Were None
The Woman on the Beach
While the City Sleeps

Safe (1995)—10/30/04
I caught up with this Tod Haynes film after nearly a decade, and liked it: a woman made ill by a toxic environment, or perhaps by an empty, superficial life, or perhaps by new age charlatans, or perhaps by her own anxieties and ignorance. Or maybe it’s all of them. What looks like it’s going to be a standard suburban “homemaker,” as she calls herself, seeing the vapidity of her existence becomes much more interesting and complex as things go along. Very satisfying.
I would probably think of this film as another in Julianne Moore’s growing collection of suburban housewife turns (The Hours and Far from Heaven [both 2002], the latter also from Haynes) if personal coincidence did not prompt me to classify it as another Steve Gilborn doctor turn. Steve was a graduate student in drama at Stanford and we were fellow students in the graduate humanities program, a two-year run of seminars that earned one a dual Ph.D. We were reasonably good friends, and after getting our degrees he went off to MIT to teach humanities while I started my academic career at Reed. I ran into him in Paris, 1969, and again in New York in 1978 (the last occasion on which I saw him in three dimensions), by which time he had “turned pro”—leaving the academy to try to make a living in acting. He went from regional theater and commercials into television and film, and casting agents have apparently decided that he makes a convincing physician. His first role in that guise, if IMDb has it right, is as a medical examiner on “Columbo,” and by my count there have been eight shots as doctors, including Dr. Hubbard in Safe, Dr. Blake in Nurse Betty (2000), and an unnamed doctor in Coastlines. It’s gotten to the point where, if I ran into him on the street, I probably wouldn’t recognize him unless he were wearing a white coat. Good luck, Steve.

Sideways (2004)—10/30/04
I don’t know whether Alexander Payne is a particularly good director—I was lukewarm about Citizen Ruth (1996) and Election (1999) and avoided About Schmidt (2002) because I loved Louis Begley’s novel and could not abide the drastic changes in setting and character. Sideways is perfectly agreeable, however, and does show that Payne has his knack for character development: the Laura Dern, Matthew Broderick, and (I’m told) Jack Nicholson characters were all first-rate. Here, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church make a slight and slightly too familiar story worth your time.
It’s a buddy movie with a road movie angle: two guys, one about to get married, on a grande bouffe week in California wine country before the ceremony. If the buddies don’t click in a buddy movie, it’s cooked; here, they’re terrific together as a pair of guys who need to distract attention (principally their own) from their decline. Giamatti’s schnuck, a failed-novelist junior high school teacher whose wife dumped him, hides behind the jargon of an oenophile. Church’s stud, a former tv actor now in voice-overs and fading, disguises career anxiety behind a rampant libido. It works, and in part because Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh have characters who are much more than convenient bedmates.
Church’s character is, shall we say, uncomfortably close to his own resumé, which is mostly in small-bore tv work. Giamatti, a graduate of Yale Drama School (and the son of Bart Giamatti, the former president of Yale who went on to be president of the American League and, briefly, commissioner of baseball), has been getting parts steadily for more than twenty years. Only with last year’s American Splendor did he demonstrate, perhaps to the surprise of many, that he could carry a film, although he got a tremendous lift from Hope Davis. Here, he has closed the debate decisively. Is there anyone else around who could have delivered this line so convincingly: “I am not drinking merlot tonight, I am not drinking fucking merlot.”

Moolaadé (2004)—10/28/04
The great Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene is now in his ninth decade, but if his latest film, and first in four years, is any indication, he hasn’t lost a step. This staggeringly well-made story of a contemporary Burkina Faso village and the civil war that erupts in it over the issue of female genital mutilation says so much, and says it so fluidly and economically, that I had no idea—until I sat down to write these words—just how jammed with information, color, character, and themes the film had been.
It begins with four young girls (aged something like five to ten) who are in flight from the village’s semi-official order of women (known as les exciseuses) who perform female circumcisions. The girls have no idea of what cultural and political stakes are invested in the practice; they simply, passionately, do not want to be “cut.” They’re afraid. They go to Collé, the middle wife of farmer, who has refused to let her own daughter be subject to excision some years earlier, and Collé provides them with moolaadé, or ritual protection, which can only be lifted if her husband orders her to speak the word ending it, an order she cannot refuse. The entire story unwinds from this situation . . . but not quite.
Because while fear and fundamental decency have motivated the girls and Collé, we also see two other elements at work, subtly altering village attitudes. The outside world enters through the portable radio, of which most families own one, and the life’s blood of the radio is the batteries sold by the merchant who comes to the village with his cart. The radio brings music, distraction, and entertainment to the very hard-working women of a family, and connects them with the outside world—Islamic radio preachers, for instance, and news broadcasts.
Then there is the village chieftain’s son, who has a job in Paris, and who is returning with money, which he dispenses to people, western gadgets, and most of all contemporary thinking—such as, he, and not his father, is going to decide whom he will marry.
If I were to try to describe how the basic story premise and these two elements work together for most of the film, I would leave out so much detail and subtle commentary that it would disfigure this gorgeous work of art. Best to say that it builds to a gigantic confrontation, vaguely reminiscent of “Lysistrata,” in which most of the women—now converted to an anti-mutilation position after a supremely heroic act by Collé and by a terrible tragedy—face off against the men, who insist, mistakenly, that female circumcision is mandated by the Koran. The entire face-off revolves in the village square around a pile of all the village’s portable radios, confiscated from the wives and set fire by the men, but still tuned to a dozen different stations.
Sembene has been almost the only cinematic voice with which black Africans have spoken to the west in the last forty years. How fortunate for them, and for us, that it such an eloquent one.

Undertow (2004)--10/27/04
This little piece of swamp gothic has elicited yelps of delight from a number of critics; I proved immune to its charms. The widower John and his sons, Tim, who is ten, and Chris, who is about fifteen, live in something of shack, raising hogs and such. That’s about it for quite a while until John’s brother Deel shows up. He’s been a guest of the state for some years, and there’s been bad blood between the brothers for years. You know Deel is trouble from the redneck swagger that Josh Lucas equips him with, and the real trouble has to do—I’m sorry, this gets rather embarrassing—with some “Messican gold coins” that their father passed on to them, but Deel, being in the jug, hasn’t been able to enjoy. Well, there’s violence, and more, and then a long, long chase with Deel in pursuit of the two boys and the coins. The end is never in doubt, of course, because it’s tipped in the very first scene with v/o by the other grandfather.
We are told that the story originated with none other than Terrence Malick, although the final version was done by David Gordon Green (who directed) and Joe Conway. If theirs is an improvement, I can’t imagine what earlier drafts looked like. Moreover, Green can’t stop fiddling with the film, sticking in freeze frames, stutters, slow motion, and every other imaginable distracting device. He also tries to cover the threadbare spots in the story with local color and atmosphere; no soap. They’re just tedious dead spots with monologues from the ten-year old about chiggers. And such.

Vera Drake (2004)—10/26/04
Andrew, the very smart guy over at filmbrain, surprised me in his closing sketch of the New York Film Festival by saying that Vera Drake was disappointing and asking, Has Mike Leigh gone soft? Hard to credit from the man who made Naked (1993), Secrets and Lies (1996), and Topsy Turvy (1999). But Andrew may be on to something. The film, set in 1950 London, when the necessities of life weren’t much more available than during the war, follows the Drake family—a closely-knit bunch of four—along their various paths. Stan is an automobile mechanic, in business with his brother; his wife Vera, like him perhaps just on the sunny side of fifty, is a domestic; Ethel is the homely and painfully shy daughter in her twenties; her brother Sid a happy, upbeat salesman of gentlemen’s clothes, like his sister living at home.
Vera is a cheery, providing mother and friend, neighbor, and all-around helpmate. This side of her extends to giving abortions to young women in trouble, to whom she is steered by an unpleasant acquaintance; Vera takes no money for the services, which she sees as what any decent person would do. Her family knows nothing about this avocation, which inevitably catches up with her, and a strong, fundamentally happy family is destroyed. There ought to have been more a feeling of inexorable fate grinding down the Drakes, but somehow Leigh manages to let it all seem rather commonplace: you do wrong, however well-intentioned you have been, you pay the price. Has Vera never seen that she might be discovered? That she is breaking the law and might have to face the consequences? The film recognizes that there is a certain amount of social hypocrisy involved: the daughter of one of Vera’s employers is more or less raped, gets pregnant, but has the money to go to a psychiatrist and then a doctor who “arrange” things for her. But Vera doesn’t apply a means test to her girls, never sees herself as affording them advantages their economic situation denies them. Nor does she ever evince any doubts about what she was doing. How is that possible? There is every reason to see her as a person of rather commonplace moral values, not a crusading reformer or militant feminist. Could she really have performed abortions without hesitation or afterthought? In a working-class London neighborhood in 1950? We are meant to feel sorry for Vera as her fate unwinds (rather long-windedly, I thought), but it’s hard to do more than shake your head about someone so little introspective as never to ask, Am I quite sure about this? It's too much to swallow.
For all that his own script betrays him, Leigh is—as usual—superbly well served by his cast. Beyond Imelda Staunton in the title role, I would call attention to Phil Davis as her husband, Alex Kelly as Ethel—as fine a job of acting almost solely by facial expression as you’re going to see—and Eddie Marsan as Reg, her boyfriend.

The Anatomy of Hell (2004)—10/25/04
My Catherine Breillat education began, and threatened to end, with this little film. The lady has developed a reputation for being something of a pioneer in erotic cinema, although I found nothing erotic in her most recent effort. It’s the story of a woman who goes to a gay bar, picks up a gay guy, and then teaches him about women. After the pickup, there are four episodes, and an ambiguous ending that may or may not have “really happened.”
Anyone who visits this site with even random drop-bys must know that I am unstinting in my admiration for the French, but on the flip side of their enormously practical and worldly orientation is a passion for abstraction and arid intellectuality, something I attribute to the style of education in their better lycées: too much Descartes, not enough Voltaire. Breillat mixes in some feminist verbiage with the gay’s rather too poetically formulated ideology of woman-hating, and it’s snooze time before they unfold very far. Add to this that the guy is played by Rocco Siffredi, an Italian who I am informed is a major star in American porn flicks, with such credits to his portfolio as Rocco’s Best Buttfucks and Captain Organ. He speaks execrable French, and his acting talent is just about what you would expect from someone in his line of work. Imagine Ron Jeremy playing Lear.

I Heart Huckabees (2004)—10/24/04
For all I know, David O. Russell is a meticulous director who storyboards every arched eyebrow and vocal inflection. But it is one of the more agreeable traits of his newest film that it has the feel of an undertaking where he gathered the cast together, tossed the script on the table, and said, “What do you want to do with this?” It’s a loosey-goosey, throw-it-against-the-barn-door-and-see-if-it-sticks-and-if-it-doesn’t-to-hell-with-it sort of movie. The script has one interesting concept: an existential detective agency, and Russell gets far more laughs out of it that you might imagine, in large part because old pros Lily Tomlin and (especially) Dustin Hoffman are running the agency. Yet a lot of the fun comes from watching people we don’t ordinarily associate with comedy being funny: Jude Law, Mark Wahlberg, and the divine Isabelle Huppert.

New York
Hero (2004)—10/23/04
It was often remarked of the Tarantino Kill Bill films that the big fight scenes, and especially that dandy with the Crazy Eighty-Eights in the restaurant, were essentially dance numbers, choreographed rather than directed. Hero is an action film, which is structured like an entire musical, one production number after another after another. Here, the production numbers are fight scenes, which—since the huge influence of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—are really special effects moments, people flying about and doing physically impossible things. All is beautifully photographed and the art design is breathtaking. But the result is a lot more of the same, even with the dash of Rashomon, and I thought it got pretty tedious. I take a back seat to nobody in my admiration of the great Chinese actor Tony Leung, but he couldn’t do much to relieve the tedium of all this fakery. The really bright spot in the cast was Daoming Chen as the King of Qin, a man with Shakespearean dimensions, a Macbeth of early medieval China.

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The Brown Bunny (2003)—10/18/04
What are we to make of Vincent Gallo? There’s more to him than an ego on a rampage (though there’s that); the man has some talent, even though he has not submitted it to discipline, and neither of his feature-length films can be dismissed. Buffalo 66 (1998) was manic, touching, out of control, on the money, and infuriating from one minute to the next. On balance, I liked it. The new one has been dragging the baggage of Gallo’s feud with Roger Ebert after the critic eviscerated the print shown at Cannes last year. (They’ve since made up.) Interestingly, for all his reputation of thinking the average film critic couldn’t find his (or her) ass with both hands if it were on fire, in response Gallo cut one-fourth of that version; what we have now is about ninety minutes, and certainly the better for that, although there are lots of longueurs and needlessly distended moments. The Brown Bunny is also toting the notorietyof non-simulated fellation with Chloë Sevigny at the controls. (This is by no means the breakthrough widely touted. The first one, which actually proceeded bluntly to climax, was in Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses [1976]). In my view, oral sex is overrated as a spectator sport, but just to make sure Gallo actually wrenches any possible element of lasciviousness and titillation right out of the scene by filling it with anger and cruelty.
Beneath all this is a decent pass at a road movie. Gallo is Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer who—after losing a race in the northeast—drives across country to a race in LA, where he also once lived with a girl named Daisy. He gases up his van with the cycle inside, then persuades a girl named Violet at the cash register (Alice Vernesci) to come with him, though he is a perfect stranger. He’s so pathetically needy and suffering that she agrees, so he drives her to her house where she can pack a few things, and when she goes inside, he drives off. It’s a Vinny Gallo moment: predictable because we see how empty Bud is, and know this girl can’t begin to fill him up. His desperation is beyond treatment, and he knows it. Even so, the moment works.
But then he does it again—stops the van at a rest stop where a middle-aged woman sits alone at an outdoor table with a cup of coffee and cigarettes. Bud sits down with her, sees that she’s obviously suffering, and they start kissing. Then the woman, Lilly, sees that Bud’s equally in pain, and tries to comfort him, but she’s helpless. To this point, the scene is beautifully played, and the expressiveness on the face of Cheryl Tiegs (fifty-six when the film was made) is affecting. Gallo shows her the greatest respect by not hiding the manifold signs of her aging, but lets her show how beautiful she’s managed it all. Then he torpedoes the scene by walking away. Once got the message across; twice was unnecessary. There follows a third time, with a Vegas hooker named Rose (Elizabeth Blake), in case anyone had dozed off earlier.
There are certainly dozeable moments—lots of long, long passages on the road with sunsets over the vast flatness of the midwest, lots more shot through a windshield that doesn’t seem to get cleaned once between the east coast and the west coast, lots and lots and lots of shots of Bud at the wheel, Bud gasing the van, Bud holding his hand out the window. A few of these moments are effective; the loneliness of the journey has some strong visual impact. But again it’s too much, so that when interest could have been sustained in what’s at the root of Bud’s suffering, Gallo—who is on the screen in almost every shot and often on it alone—lets it slip away.
We get at the mystery in the last half hour, when Sevigny, as Daisy, appears. There’s a twist, and then another, which I won’t go into, except to say that it all feels a little rushed after the languorous road scenes, and while it works on paper, it doesn’t have quite the impact I suspect Gallo was seeking. We do get the sense that he is saying: at the end of the road, there may be nothing there.
The Brown Bunny stars Gallo, who also wrote, produced, directed, and edited it and acted as Director of Photography and one of three cameramen. This kind of one-man band is fine when the man in question has good judgment born of long experience and a sense of proportion. John Sayles comes to mind. I get the impression Gallo doesn’t want anyone looking over his shoulder, but it might not be a bad idea. Of course, if he’s not calling all the shots, he might not get to make out with Cheryl Tiegs and get blown by Chloë Sevigny.

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Shanghai Gesture (1941?)—10/16/04
The interrogative above is because, while IMDb gives that as the release date, the film itself carries a dates of 1936 and (“copyright renewed”) 1939. I’d say the latter date. It’s a rare Josef von Sternberg that does not star Marlene Dietrich, the woman he turned into an icon with astounding lighting and adoring camera angles. He tries to do the same here with Gene Tierney, but as gorgeous as Tierney was, she had none of Dietrich’s character. Even so, the film is great fun.
It’s Shanghai in late 1930-something. In the opening street scene (shot, of course, on Hollywood sets), the ever-present von Sternberg fog machine is going full blast to get interesting shadows, lighting effects, mystery, danger. And what about those two guys coming through the crowd in the ricksha, the Chinese and the Arab? They look—wait! It’s Clyde Fillmore and Victor Mature (in a fez, perhaps his finest moment). Along comes a wisecracking blonde from Brooklyn. Hold on, the ride is just beginning.
There’s really no summarizing the movie. It’s centered around a big casino run by one Mother Gin Sling, and the shots of that several-tiered site, usually from above, are amazing: it’s an opera house, set up for great tragedy; it’s an arena for life and death struggles; it’s the descending circles of Dante’s hell; it’s whatever you want it to be by virtue of von Sternberg’s suggestive visual style and fluid camera. People at the very lowest level are playing roulette, most of them unable to stop. (The roulette croupier is Marcel Dalio, a role he was about to reprise in Casablanca.) People wander in and out. There is some sort of threat to Mother Gin Sling’s empire. She may or may not prevail. The threat emanates from a real estate baron played by Walter Huston to whom Mother has some previous connection, as yet unrecognized by anyone else. Throughout these goings on, there are lots of minor characters to keep things lively—Eric Blore, for example, Albert Basserman (who played the last hope of peace in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent [1940]), and even Mike Mazurki (who was Hungarian) as a ricksha driver.
It all becomes (without going into any more details) far darker than you would expect from a Hollywood film of this period. It looks to have been a Tierney vehicle, but nobody every accused Tierney of being able to act, and the film was taken over by Una Munson, who plays Mother Gin Sling. If you have a chance, don’t miss her.
One thought: for decades, we’ve been treated, and rightly so, to analysis by film historians of the terrible racism leveled against African-Americans in the US film industry over the years, especially before World War II. All true, but there is also truly dreadful and abundant evidence of the treatment of Asians by the same industry (see the Charlie Chan series). In this film, there are three Chinese characters with speaking parts more than a grunt or a nod, and they are all played by westerners in low-rent makeup. It’s both embarrassing and infuriating.

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Uncovered: The War in Iraq (2004)—10/16/04
Robert Greenwald followed up his Outfoxed, a documentary on our unbalanced friends at Fox News, a film I have not yet seen, with this documentary on the war. It is completely absorbing, a careful, rigorous piece of work which gets all the main characters on record about WMDs in Iraq, time after time after time, then brings on something like two dozen long-time veterans of CIA, DoD, DoE, and DoS intelligence, along with some people from the weapons inspection teams, to refute them chapter and verse, effectively closing the door behind W, the Cheyn-saw, Condi, Rumi, and Powell when they try to back out. The most devastating case is made against Powell, whose vaunted integrity is reduced to shreds. All this is done more or less quietly, with no showing off.
Unfortunately for Greenwald and his financing people, a little number called Farenheit 9/11 beat him to the punch. I’ve lost track of how many millions Moore’s film (which I admired, but which has none of the tightness of argument and evidentiary support of Greenwald’s) has made by now. But IMDb says that Uncovered made just over $31,000 in the US on seven screens (in NYC, SF, and LA) during a few days in August. It deserves much, much better.

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The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)--10/14/04
John Cassavetes was famously driven to go his own way in the making of films, and films are the better for it (mostly). He strove for emotional truth and found the only way he could achieve it, again mostly, was by blunt and sometimes brutal confrontation. Film audiences, especially in America, are not known to be hungry for this sort of thing, but Cassavetes, rather heroically, in my opinion, found his people and hewed to his mission.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is these days sold as film noir, and there’s some of the genre’s veneer on it (including one long scene in an automobile that so dark you can’t see a goddamned thing). But it’s really about self-deception, something so common in us all that it’s not easy seeing it played out. Cassavetes makes it slightly easier for us to observe by making his main character something of a sleazewad, the owner of a strip club in Los Angeles. But we all delude ourselves (I’m doing everything I can, it isn’t my fault, I’ve got things under control, and the ever-popular I’m not going to die), on a reasonably regular basis, as far as I can tell, and it isn’t long before we see enough of Cosmo in ourselves to make the theater seat extremely uncomfortable. His club is successful, and at the opening he pays off a loan shark who set him up in business at a swinging interest rate, a task that has taken him seven years. He’s on top of the world, and he takes three of his young dancers (respectively, gulp, blink, and oooh) with him on an offshore gambling boat, where he loses more than he was carrying. The top of the world suddenly starts to look like the bottom when we meet these guys, but Cosmo is still in control, right?
All of this is structured in a way to create an objectification of self-delusion in the story that Cosmo himself should have learned from. At his club, there is a chunky, dumpy middle-aged “entertainer” who sings (a capella and dreadfully) while the girls strip around him. His professional name is Mr. Sophistication, and he is what used be called when I went to college an objective correlative: he thinks he’s the star of Cosmo’s stage shows, when he’s a pathetic freak people come to laugh at while they’re ogling the girls. But to Cosmo, he’s the centerpiece, just as the flimsy, twelfth-rate acts Cosmo considers his productions, which he’s “created” and “directed.” When you’re kidding yourself and you don’t want to look closely at it, you don’t look closely at others who are doing the same.
Eventually, of course, the bad guys tell Cosmo what he already knows—that he doesn’t have the cash to pay off his five-figure debt. But he can erase it if he’ll polish a Chinese gangster who’s in their hair. The title of the film tells you that the target dies. I’ll leave it to you to watch all the complication thereunto attending.
The film is (like most Cassavetes films) beautifully played, in a semi-improvisatory style where—at least when it comes to dialogue—more is better. Like most people, Cassavetes’s characters don’t know when to shut up. Ben Gazzara, a Cassavetes regular, is a wonderful Cosmo, cocky, nowhere near achieving the degree of mastery he thinks (and he reveals little hints that reality is getting through, then suppresses them), his vulnerability constantly struggling with his need to deny. The chorines are mostly decorative, although Alice Freedlund as Sherry gives it a little more. Best are the thugs, led by Morgan Woodward, who certainly scared the hell out of me; Seymour Cassel, another Cassavetes stock-company performer; and Timothy Carey. You might remember him from twenty years earlier as one of the three soldiers condemned to be shot for high command blunders in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (195 ).
The print I saw was badly scratched. Moreover, I’m not quite sure what I saw. The original cut was 135 minutes; the US release was 108 minutes; theversion I saw, perhaps the European release, was 114 minutes. Your best bet is to buy or rent the five-filmCassavetes package (including Killing)just put out by Criterion.

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Modigliani (2004)—10/10/04
It wasn’t that this biopic set in the Paris art world of 1919-20 suffered from the same defects as almost every biopic ever made—the compulsive name-dropping (“Cocteau, old man, come over for a drink, everyone’s here, Pablo, Gertrude, everyone”), the anachronisms (an Italian state official announces himself in the name of the “Repubblica Italiana” in the early 1890s, when Italy was a monarchy), the wild distortions and inventions that anyone with a fifth-grade education could pick out. It wasn’t that the international cast couldn’t decide what English with a French accent, to stand in for people speaking French in an English-language film, ought to sound like, so we got at least ten different versions. It wasn’t that Modigliani and Jeanne amble down an empty Paris (actually, a set in Bucharest) street in 1919 late one night, tipsy and in love, then dance to the strains of . . . Edith Piaf (born 1915) singing “La Vie en Rose” (written 1942). It wasn’t even that the damned thing refused to stop—not only was it a long, long (nearly) two hours, it had something like five natural climaxes, one after the other after . . . no, it wasn’t even that.
It was the shabby, stupid, manipulative sentimentality that pervaded the entire enterprise, the mendacity of director Mick Davis in his second feature, which he also “wrote.” (The word is a stretch for lines like “I cannot escape destiny” and that sort of garbage.) Most of the plot is sheer invention, centering around a Modigliani rivalry with Picasso, the premise that Modigliani would not show his work, without which the plot simply collapses, and resisted selling it. In fact, Modigliani had a number of shows in studios and galleries. The film is at least correct in that it shows him to have been a self-destructive drunk and drug addict, but asks for us to bear with him, redemption is just around the corner—we can count on this, almost, because the gorgeous Elsa Zylberstein plays his lover, Jeanne Hébuterne, and women who look like her generally get a bad dude on the right track. The redemption will come when Modi finally agrees to enter a competition (which never happened) which includes Picasso, and others, and Picasso and Modi both paint paintings they never painted, and Jeanne takes home the 5,000 francs, but Modi never sees it, because he decides to get plastered while the competition is being judged, tries to run out on his bill, gets beat up, and dies.
The whole enterprise, with the exception of one or two facts, is as false as all the Modiglianis and Picasso fakes we are shown, and indeed everyone in the every audience dumb enough (like me) to spend a little money to see it will know they are fakes, because the insurance on using the real thing—for which permission couldn’t be obtained in any case—would be prohibitive. So we know we’re looking at phonies, which encourages our suspicion that the whole undertaking is phoney.
No member of the cast is especially interesting, though they do suggest that casting was done by someone associated with the United Nations. Zylberstein is French, Amid Djabili (Picasso) is British of Iranian heritage, Eva Herzigova (Olga Picasso) is Czech, and Andy Garcia (Modigliani) was born in Cuba. Garcia here is as wrong as they get, wrong for the part, wrong trying to bring it off. He’s a respectable ensemble actor—see The Untouchables (1987) and especially Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995)—but a lousy lead. To make things worse, he’s put on a fair amount of flab (Modigliani was lean), looks a lot older (Modi was thirty-five when he died, Andy’s forty-eight), and does a sitcom version of an Italian—with the hands, enough already. It’s also a considerably physical role, lots of jumping about on tables, dancing, prancing, that sort of thing, which Garcia would be well advised to avoid in the future. Chris Walken can do this kind of stuff; Andy Garcia should stick to snarling hoods. Finally, the part is written for Modi to be a charmer, and Garcia works hard at the charm, which is the problem—he’s working, and it should come naturally.
Amedeo Modigliani was a talented painter (and sculptor) who did some portraits and nudes of great beauty. But he was a lush who drank away his talent and essentially destroyed the life of the baby he created with Jeanne, Giovanna Modigliani, as well as the baby Jeanne was carrying when she committed suicide a day after his death. I find it hard to root for him and consider his death sad, but a self-inflicted tragedy. Too bad Davis didn’t have the guts to make that film. You’ve been warned.

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I Married a Witch (1942)
It Happened Tomorrow (1944)
And Then There Were None (1945)—10/04
If Jean Renoir never quite found his groove in the US, René Clair got in it at once and stayed there for ten years before returning to France. Clair had already demonstrated his great gift for comedy, beginning with The Italian Straw Hat (1927, silent), Under the Rooftops of Paris (1930), Le Million, and A Nous la liberté (both 1931). His first American film, The Ghost Goes West (1935) was a lovely little comedy about a Scottish family, and ghost, in the American west, with Robert Donat and Elsa Lanchester backed up by the incomparable Eugene Pallette, he of the cement-mixer voice. After a quickie in England, Clair came back to do The Flame of New Orleans (1941) with La Dietrich, a film I hope to catch up with in the next couple of weeks. But then came three beauties, all being shown as part of a Clair festival in the Latin Quarter.
I Married a Witch is a frothy little romantic fantasy I’ve loved for many years. Frederic March marries a woman (Veronica Lake) who is the descendant of Salem witches, and, with her father, Cecil Kellaway, they end up fulfilling March’s ambition to be governor of Massachusetts by casting a spell on the entire state. As March’s best pal, Robert Benchley, puts it, shaking his head at a vote of several hundred thousand to zero for the other guy, “He didn’t even vote for himself.” (Benchley was one of the few guys who could keep a simple line like that really simple, and get huge roars from the audience.) March finally convinces Lake that they can’t use these powers any more, it’s not . . . well, right, somehow, but that involves getting papa Kellaway under lock and key, or more precisely in a bottle with a firm stopper. Fabulous fun.
It Happened Tomorrow is, to borrow a term from Shakespearean criticism, something of a problem comedy. The laughs are not so much at things you could call funny as improbable, though with a logic of their own. It’s set in mid-nineteenth century America, during the Civil War. Dick Powell is a reporter who wants to get to tomorrow’s news before it occurs; John Philliber is a strange old guy who actually delivers him tomorrow’s paper, but with the advice that he shouldn’t use it. Powell does, of course, to make some safe bets on the races and so forth, until one day he comes across a piece about himself he doesn’t want to see. Neat, tight, solid.
And Then There Were None is taken from an Agatha Christie novel, Ten Little Niggers (released in this country as Ten Little Indians). Ten people, unknown to one another, are invited by an unknown host to an island off the English coast. There are hints that these are people not without shadows on their past. One by one, they start dying off—and not by natural causes. It becomes clear that one of them is dispatching all the rest, and the issue becomes not only who, but why? There’s plenty of dark humor along the way, and some grand character actors fill the playbill: Walter Huston, Barry Fitzgerald, Mischa Auer, Judith Anderson, C. Aubrey Smith, Richard Haydn. June Duprez and Louis Hayward are the romantic leads; for years, Hayward was the guy you went to when you couldn’t get Errol Flynn for a swordfighting movie—Captain Pirate, The Fortunes of Captain Blood, The Return of Monte Cristo, The Lady in the Iron Mask, The Black Arrow. You get the idea.
Clair worked on the scripts of most of his films, and he was gifted with a consummate sense of pace and timing. He knew when to hit the jets, when to slow things down and let you catch your breath. He seemed to understand the American sense of humor, and the comic possibilities of the language, almost from the moment he arrived. All of the Clair films mentioned here are available on video, and most on DVD. Not a bad way to spend a weekend.

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The Woman on the Beach (1947)—10/4/04
As the Nazis scared Fritz Lang out of Germany (see journal entry immediately below), they scared Jean Renoir out of France when they invaded, conquered, and occupied. Renoir came to the states and made some films: an anti-Nazi This Land is Mine (1943), The Southerner (1945), Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), then went to India for The River (1951). He returned to make a number of films in France, but lived and died in Southern California. Renoir’s legendary status as a director is built largely on films he made in the 1930s, and for the most part they are stunning. La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939) I regard as one of the three or four best films ever made, a work that is nothing less than perfect. But when he moved to America, his films slipped several notches. Certainly working in a different language was a problem; he was fluent in English but it’s just not the same as operating in the native tongue. The cultural differences may have caused him problems, though he was sensitive to regional differences—The Southerner, about rural poverty, is perhaps his best American effort.
The Woman on the Beach is not a work by which I wish to remember him. It’s a very fuzzy melodrama: a Coast Guard officer who was torpedoed and suffers from recurring nightmares of drowning; a blind former painter; the painter’s wife, a self-described “tramp.” The lieutenant seems to be going crazy, and keeps saying that he needs to “know himself.” He has a nice, conventional girl friend, but the painter’s wife is irresistible. But the painter is possessive and wildly jealous, and may have to be eliminated if the affair is to go forward. There’s material here for something dark and twisty, I suppose, but Renoir loses the handle on it. He never quite decides what the lieutenant’s problem is, so all the guy’s raving introspection seems pointless. Does the painter’s wife love him or hate him? Does she stay with him out of passion, wifely loyalty, or guilt? Scenes open bumpily, never appearing to go anywhere, then sputter out.
The one bright spot in all this is the painter, taken on by Charles Bickford, a splendid character actor who seems to have been born in late middle age. His voice is a great instrument, and he plays it effortlessly. Robert Ryan is the Coast Guard officer. In a career largely devoted to playing heavies—and playing them superbly—he finds himself at sea (sorry) with a semi-crazy who’s really a nice guy underneath it all. Joan Bennett is the wife, and while she has her moments, the role is written in such a contradictory, obscure way that she never puts any clear conviction into the character—probably because she has no idea who this woman is and what she’s doing.

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While the City Sleeps (1956)—10/3/04
Fritz Lang was forty-two years old and Germany’s preeminent filmmaker in 1933 when Josef Goebbels invited him to the propaganda ministry for a little talk. It transpired that Goebbels’s boss thought Metropolis (1925) was the greatest film ever made, and the idea was to put him to work making films for Hitler’s new regime. It was no secret that Lang’s mother was Jewish, but apparently the Nazis were willing to overlook that and make him an honorary Aryan. As Lang told the story, he could look out the windows of Goebbels’s office and see the clock on the exterior wall of a nearby office building. It was a few minutes to noon on a Saturday. He had only minutes to get to the bank. He thanked Goebbels politely, said he would like to discuss the generous offer with his wife, left, and went to his bank, drawing out all his assets. He then phoned his wife and told her to pack. They left almost immediately, going first to France, where Lang directed one film, and then to the US, where he directed twenty-five before returning to Germany for two late efforts. Poor eyesight forced him to stop working, and he died in 1976.
I was in my final months of teaching at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 1970. My colleague and friend Gene Lunn, also an historian of modern Europe with a heavy film addiction, had agreed to join me in a summer school course for Master of Arts in Teaching candidates. But since neither of us had ever taught a film course before, the program wouldn’t authorize us unless we could get a pro to join us. We rustled up Andries Deinum, who taught film and ran something called The Center for the Moving Image at Portland State University.
Andries was born in the Netherlands in 1921 (I believe), went to the UK during the war, where he worked with the OSS, then came to the US—southern California, to be specific. He had worked on documentary films as a very young man, and wanted to get into the US industry. As he told it, “I was walking down Sunset Boulevard one day not long after I arrived, and there, standing on the sidewalk talking to someone, was Fritz Lang. It was like being a young composer in Berlin and suddenly seeing Brahms. I was thunderstruck.” Andries worked for Lang as a personal assistant, and also for John Ford, before getting a teaching job as the University of Southern California in 1950. Things went swimmingly for a while, but Hollywood was of course a major target of the red-baiters running the blacklist, and after a few years Andries—always on the left, and a member of the Communist Party in 1946-50—found himself before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee of cherished memory. They asked him to name names; he politely suggested they blow it out their collective elbow. USC, great guardian of our personal freedoms that it was in those days, fired him the next day. But Andries was a fighter, and he continued to speak out for what he believed in—social activism, freedom of expression and association, the left in general. He served as a sort of research director for the Hollywood Ten before making his way north to Portland.
The Oregon of these days is known as a sort of quirky haven for the unconventional—assisted suicide and that sort of thing. In the early ‘60s, it was run by right-wing yahoos and a nebbish of a mayor named Terry Schrunk. (I had to sign a loyalty oath to teach at Reed, a private institution, in 1963.) Schrunk’s police closed down a theater showing Louis Malle’s The Lovers, there was a protest at city hall, and Andries went toe-to-toe with Hizzoner. To its everlasting credit, Portland State hired him not long thereafter. Andries thought his years in the party were a youthful mistake, but he was never apologetic about it. Communist influence in the movies? “One night, we held a big party because some of us working on a movie had been asked to create a little business for a brief shot of several men going up in an elevator. I gave one of the guys two bars of a tune to whistle. It was ‘The Internationale.’ We partied all night.” He realized he probably wasn’t going to get any directing jobs when, on one set, Lang told him he was going to get his big moment. Andries smoked a pipe in those days, and Lang wanted him to take several big puffs off camera and then blow the smoke into the frame, for atmosphere. After that, teaching started looking pretty good.
Lang had turned out some tight little films when he first came to the US: Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), and later followed with several minor-key beauties, Hangmen Also Die (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944), The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street (both 1945). Rancho Notorious (1952) has its fans and The Big Heat (1953) is always cited as top-drawer noir. By 1956, though, the well was running dry, and While the City Sleeps was not served well by its script, which tries to do far too much and ends up doing almost nothing. It’s a story about a struggle for control of a media empire in New York, and that’s interwoven with a love story, and they’re both tangled up with a serial killer (although they didn’t call them that in 1956). The treatment of the killer is especially dreadful; he’s played by John Barrymore Jr., who seems to have taken his inspiration from the potheads in those marijuana movies made during the ‘30s. It works best as a collection of “moments,” of glances and gestures and jokes and double-entendres (Lang works a surprising amount of sex into the conversations) and amusing reversals, and as a commentary on a phenomenon Lang thought was becoming very big and had no idea how big it would in fact become. He deals with newspapers, television, comic books (!), corporate power, and shows none of them in an especially flattering light.
The cast included Dana Andrews (who is the hero, but also drunk about half the time), George Sanders (who committed suicide in 1972, leaving a note that said, “I’m so bored”), Thomas Mitchell, Rhonda Fleming, Vincent Price (in non-Gothic mode, but still so creepy it’s hard to see how even the golddigger played by Fleming would let him lay a hand on her), Ida Lupino (by far the most effective, and hilarious in a bar scene where Andrews is staring loopily into her cleavage), James Craig, and Howard Duff (the radio voice of Sam Spade, and a great one). At least one of these people seemed to be in every movie I saw during the 1950s. Having them all in the same one was like old home week.
Our course that summer included Lang’s M, on which Andries held forth stunningly; de Sica’s Umberto D; Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution—films I was watching for the first time, and which remain among my personal favorites. As knowledgeable as Andries was, he left the two novices plenty of room, and I think Gene and I grew a lot during those two months. Part of my own growth came from just being in the same room with Gene for a few hours a day. He was one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever known, and if I had not already lost any religious convictions, I’m sure his death from cancer at age forty-eight in 1990 would have finished them off. Andries died in January 1995 at the age of seventy-six.

Grappling with the Grape

I don’t know whether Alexander Payne is a particularly good director—I was lukewarm about Citizen Ruth (1996) and Election (1999) and avoided About Schmidt (2002) because I loved Louis Begley’s novel and could abide the drastic changes in setting and character.  Sideways is perfectly agreeable, however, and does show that Payne has his knack for character development: the Laura Dern, Matthew Broderick, and (I’m told) Jack Nicholson characters were all first-rate.  Here, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church make a slight and slightly too familiar story worth your time.

     It’s a buddy movie with a road movie angle: two guys, one about to get married, on a grande bouffe week in California wine country before the ceremony.  If the buddies don’t click in a buddy movie, it’s cooked; here, they’re terrific together as a pair of guys who need to distract attention (principally their own) from their decline.  Giamatti’s schnuck, a failed-novelist junior high school teacher whose wife dumped him, hides behind the jargon of an oenophile.  Church’s stud, a former tv actor now in voice-overs and fading, disguises career anxiety behind a rampant libido.  It works, and in part because Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh have characters who are much more than convenient bedmates.

     Church’s character is, shall we say, uncomfortably close to his own resumé, which is mostly in small-bore tv work.  Giamatti, a graduate of Yale Drama School (and the son of Bart Giamatti, the former president of Yale who went on to be president of the American League and, briefly, commissioner of baseball), has been getting parts steadily for more than twenty years.  Only with last year’s American Splendor did he demonstrate, perhaps to the surprise of many, that he could carry a film, although he got a tremendous lift from Hope Davis.  Here, he has closed the debate decisively.  Is there anyone else around who could have delivered this line so convincingly: “I am not drinking merlot tonight, I am not drinking fucking merlot.” 

An Old Friend

I caught up with this Tod Haynes film after nearly a decade, and liked it: a woman made ill by a toxic environment, or perhaps by an empty, superficial life, or perhaps by new age charlatans, or perhaps by her own anxieties and ignorance.  Or maybe it’s all of them.  What looks like it’s going to be a standard suburban “homemaker,” as she calls herself, seeing the vapidity of her existence becomes much more interesting and complex as things go along.  Very satisfying.

     I would probably think of this film as another in Julianne Moore’s growing collection of suburban housewife turns (The Hours and Far from Heaven [both 2002], the latter also from Haynes) if personal coincidence did not prompt me to classify it as another Steve Gilborn doctor turn.  Steve was a graduate student in drama at Stanford and we were fellow students in the graduate humanities program, a two-year run of seminars that earned one a dual Ph.D.  We were reasonably good friends, and after getting our degrees he went off to MIT to teach humanities while I started my academic career at Reed.  I ran into him in Paris, 1969, and again in New York in 1978 (the last occasion on which I saw him in three dimensions), by which time he had “turned pro”—leaving the academy to try to make a living in acting.  He went from regional theater and commercials into television and film, and casting agents have apparently decided that he makes a convincing physician.  His first role in that guise, if IMDb has it right, is as a medical examiner on “Columbo,” and by my count there have been eight shots as doctors, including Dr. Hubbard in Safe, Dr. Blake in Nurse Betty (2000), and an unnamed doctor in Coastlines.  It’s gotten to the point where, if I ran into him on the street, I probably wouldn’t recognize him unless he were wearing a white coat.  Good luck, Steve. 

A Master Forges Ahead, Masterfully

The great Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene is now in his ninth decade, but if his latest film, Moolaadé, his first in four years, is any indication, he hasn’t lost a step.  This staggeringly well-made story of a contemporary Burkina Faso village and the civil war that erupts in it over the issue of female genital mutilation says so much, and says it so fluidly and economically, that I had no idea—until I sat down to write these words—just how jammed with information, color, character, and themes the film had been.

     It begins with four young girls (aged something like five to ten) who are in flight from the village’s semi-official order of women who perform female circumcisions.  The girls have no idea of what cultural and political stakes are invested in the practice; they simply, passionately, do not want to be “cut.” They’re afraid.  They go to Collé, the middle wife of farmer, who has refused to let her own daughter be subject to excision some years earlier, and Collé provides them with moolaadé, or ritual protection, which can only be lifted if her husband orders her to speak the word ending it, an order she cannot refuse.  The entire story unwinds from this situation . . . but not quite.

     Because while fear and fundamental decency have motivated the girls and Collé, we also see two other elements at work, subtly altering village attitudes.  The outside world enters through the portable radio, of which most families own one, and the life’s blood of the radio is the batteries sold by the merchant who comes to the village with his cart.  The radio brings music, distraction, and entertainment to the very hard-working women of a family, and connects them with the outside world—Islamic radio preachers, for instance, and news broadcasts.

     Then there is the village chieftain’s son, who has a job in Paris, and who is returning with money, which he dispenses to people, western gadgets, and most of all contemporary thinking—such as, he, and not his father, is going to decide whom he will marry. 

     If I were to try to describe how the basic story premise and these two elements work together for most of the film, I would leave out so much detail and subtle commentary that it would disfigure this gorgeous work of art.  Best to say that it builds to a gigantic confrontation, vaguely reminiscent of “Lysistrata,” in which most of the women—now converted to an anti-mutilation position after a supremely heroic act by Collé and by a terrible tragedy—face off against the men, who insist, mistakenly, that female circumcision is mandated by the Koran.  The entire face-off revolves in the village square around a pile of all the village’s portable radios, confiscated from the wives and set fire by the men, but still tuned to a dozen different stations. 

     Sembene has been almost the only cinematic voice with which black Africans have spoken to the west in the last forty years.  How fortunate for them, and for us, that it such an eloquent one.

SEPTEMBER 2004
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Old Boy
Experiment Perilous
Where the Sidewalk Ends
Land of Plenty
Inside Job
The General
Vivacious Lady
A Woman’s Secret
Salvador Allende
Ae . . . Fond Kiss
Infernal Affairs
Wittgenstein

Paris
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)—9/30/04
Half a dozen times in the last several years, I’ve noticed this film directed by William Dieterle in TCM listings, and for one reason or another never made it a priority. I’ve never made it through a Victor Hugo novel, and this one, like many, could be linked to a chain and anchor a decent-sized skiff. As one of the 1930s adaptations of “great literature,” I expected it to be overblown, absurdly serious, wildly anachronistic, and lavishly sentimentalized. It was indeed all of those things, and yet . . . and yet . . .
The film has terrific energy, which admittedly it needs to blow past its shortcomings. We see the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris in the very first shot, out of a window facing onto its square. The cathedral in that shot, as in numerous others in the movie, is a painted flat. Sheesh! Other times, they use a set for the front steps and the statuary in niches around the recessed doorways, with actual cardboard or plaster of Paris statues. From the top, in the bell towers, one looks out over the (set of the) city of Paris and notices that geography has been, shall we say, improved. But very quickly after that first shot, and a bit of fussy business involving the unbearable Harry Davenport as King Louis XI, we are plunged into a roistering carnival of the poor—players, buskers, cutpurses, and a contest by acclamation for the King of Fools. It’s lively, fun, and gets us through some more rough spots—Maureen O’Hara as a gypsy, which would be nice if gypsies came from Ireland and always had their lipstick in place, and the very young, very svelte Edmond O’Brien as the young poet Gringoire.
The King of Fools contest is won by Quasimodo, the hunchback bellringer of the cathedral, who is of course Charles Laughton in some rather remarkable makeup—not just for his back, but especially for his face, his actual right eye covered with what is meant to appear a mutated growth and a false eye appearing halfway down his face, his mouth full of gigantic teeth spaced like headstones in a cemetery. Quasimodo is deaf, can speak a little—a lot more as the film goes on—and Laughton gives him life, fire, and interest.
For the rest, Cedrick Hardwick plays the villainous Frollo despiccably enough to engage, and the film otherwise complies with the federal ordinance from the 1930s that no film with a six-figure budget could be produced with the appearance of Thomas Mitchell—here as Colpin, King of the Beggars. Dieterle, who emigrated from fimmaking in Germany at the beginning of the decade, specialized in rather slow-moving biopics starring Paul Muni (Pasteur, Juarez, Zola), handles big scenes well enough here, and Quasimodo saving Esmeralda from the gallows and then fending off the marauding invaders of the cathedral with huge blocks of stone and then molten metal are great fun. If you can bear the sanctimony and the imposition of nineteenth century political ideas on fifteenth-century Paris, you might get a kick out of it.

Paris
Old Boy (2003)—9/29/04
This amazing effort by director Pak Chan-Wook is the story of two intertwined quests for vengeance, although that—and practically any other summary generalization—is woefully inadequate. Even so, the critical word in the preceding sentence is “story.” This is not a film about something that happened, or will happen, or might happen. It’s a story, sneaking up on the territory of a yarn or a tale, but using recognizable human motivations and feelings, needs and drives, intelligence and blindness to tell itself. Like all stories in that sense, it requires that you take it as a story rather than a documentary, and it has a moral (in this case, all sins have both retributions and redemptions). The treatment, or presentation, or style is forceful, often brilliant and imaginative and original, but the story is what holds it all together.
A man, Woo, deftly presented in the quickest and most telling possible brushstrokes as a drunken slob, is kidnapped and held in captivity for fifteen years, during which time he is drugged, hypnotized (without his knowledge, of course), and never sees his captor(s). He does have television, which reveals to him that his wife has been murdered and he is suspected of the crime. Then, just as he has, Edmond Dantés-like, almost burrowed out of his apartment/cell, he is released. Naturally, his every thought is revenge. But his captor knows every move he is making, and communicates with him by a cell phone he has provided him. The captor toys with him, leading him here and there, to this lead, down that blind alley. Woo makes some smart guesses, gets closer, but the captor always has the upper hand. Along the way, the prisoner enlists the assistance of a young women, Mido. The clues are tantalizing, then start—with the assistance of surfacing memories portrayed in flashback—to materialize into a larger picture, until after many challenges, some of them brutal, there is a final confrontation.
That’s very abstract, I know, but to get any more concrete would be to compromise the story, which is delicious—overwrought in places, but then in a story like this, too much is barely enough. It’s the kind of excess De Palma is always trying to achieve and never knows how to contain, the kind of excess Hitchcock was always reaching for but afraid would offend either audiences or studios. (He let it go a little in Psycho, but only a little.) You really have to get into the story, and the superbly-played characters, to see just how right Pak makes everything.
To do that, though, requires a reasonably strong stomach. At the afternoon screening I attended, two young ladies, students of about eighteen or (tops) nineteen sitting behind me nearly lost their lunch during the scene where Woo eats a live squid and came even closer during a sequence in which teeth are pulled with a claw hammer (without novocaine, to be sure). But there is also an astounding sequence in which, armed only with his trusty hammer, he takes on something like twenty guys armed with baseball bats in a narrow hallway. The whole thing is shot like a side-scroller arcade game, and the pacing is close to genius level. At the end, our man prevails and walks out of the building—with a knife protruding from between his shoulder blades. QT, who I saw strolling—no strutting—down the Boulevard Saint-Germain a couple of weeks ago, and who chaired the grand jury at Cannes, must have been swooning. Yet while there is plenty of violence in the film, the worst violence seemed to me psychic, or emotional. Pak has said that he was really dealing with guilty consciences; the pain the characters put themselves and each through as memories are retrieved and the real mystery—the “why” rather than the “who” of the kidnapping, the wife’s murder, and a very great deal more—is greater than anything physically inflicted.
The long, complicated resolution can’t even be broached here without ruining the film, so all I can say is: retribution, redemption of a sort (not to forget self-mutilation). Choi Min-Sik, as the prisoner, and Kang Hae-Jong, as Mido, get top marks. For a review that takes in more of Pak’s work than I can, see the extremely talented and knowledgeable filmbrain.

Paris
Experiment Perilous (1944)—9/27/04
Jacques Tourneur came to America with his film director father and followed him into the industry. For most of the 1930s, he cranked out shorts (“The Romance of Radium,” “The Man in the Barn”) and made the jump to B features in 1939, when he was thirty-five. Along the way, he made the acquaintance of Val Lewton, and when Lewton was appointed head of RKO’s new horror film unit in the early 1940s, he put Tourneur to work. The results were Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and Leopard Man (1944)—superior B’s , but B’s all the same. Experiment Perilous isn’t exactly a horror film: “gothic” may capture the flavor better. It certainly deserves to be called perfect, as in: “perfectly awful.”
The plot, to stretch a word, has something to do with strange goings on in a Murray Hill mansion circa 1903. It’s all utterly preposterous, with no particular motivation and characterization by insinuation rather than writing or performing. Paul Lukas plays an older rich guy with the inevitable younger wife, here Hedy Lamarr. George Brent is the doctor who becomes involved with them, smells a rat, nearly screws things up, but comes out OK. Lukas, who was born in Budapest, is passed off as Austrian born, so the accent makes a sort of sense. Lamarr, in fact Austrian born, still has a thick overlay of Viennese consonants; she plays a young woman born in Vermont. Brent . . . well, Brent doesn’t really play anything, and never did (with the possible exception of the doctor in The Spiral Staircase [1947], which I vaguely remember as his one decent performance). He was in a gazillion movies from the early thirties into the early fifties, almost always as a male lead. He wasn’t movie star handsome, he put on more than a few pounds in his early forties, he was unable give a clean line reading for love nor money. The man couldn’t even walk right: he appears to have either a severe malfunction somewhere in the groin or to be suffering from irritable bowel syndrome. With no story and a laughable cast, Tourneur fiddled with lighting, but I think he gave it up as a lost cause pretty early on.
French film audiences are as a rule pretty tolerant of even dreadful films: they will look for the pearl hiding in the oyster, even if it’s only one shot, one line. But here, when the Brent and Lukas characters duke it out at the end, the double for Lukas looked more like Hedy Lamarr, and the house erupted in laughter. For the record, Tourneur made a slightly larger budget feature in Canyon Passage (1946), which had Dana Andrews, Suzan Hayward, and the only man ever to challenge Brent and Donald Wood for worst Hollywood actor, Brian Donleavy. Then he did a single noir masterpiece, Out of the Past (1947), with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, thereafter subsiding into the B’s and television.

Paris
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)—9/24/04
If there is an American film of the postwar years that might even remotely deserve categorizing as film noir, you can safely wager that the French will track it down and run it in a revival house. After all, they invented the term. There is an Otto Preminger festival in a Latin Quarter cinema, and it features this noirish effort by Otto, actually intended to make some money (which his films hadn’t been doing for a while) by recapturing the magic of Laura (1944). Sidewalk reunites Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, and again he is a cop who falls in love with a woman involved in a case he’s working (since the woman is Tierney, who can blame him?). There’s no Clifton Webb to add arch counterbalance, but there is a truckload of top-notch support players from the early postwar ear: Gary Merrill (who in the same year would appear in All About Eve with his wife, Bette Davis), Karl Malden, Tom Tully, Neville Brand (as, what else, a punk), Harry von Zell for God’s sake (long time announcer on the George Burns and Gracie Allen radio and then television shows), and even Craig Stevens, television’s future Peter Gunn, here in a pretty-boy pompadour.
But the movie doesn’t work. The story, about a bad good guy cop, gets him in some really hot water, and a real noir treatment would have done more than bathe him in dark shadows and expressionist camera angles. If he were as amoral as he appears for most of the film, he wouldn’t suddenly turn smarmy at the end. Instead, he would indeed have taken what Richard Nixon liked to call “the easy way out,” grabbed the girl and promotion, and brushed aside that he had murdered someone, however “accidentally.” (Ben Hecht’s script loads that murder with so much unbelievable countervailing weight that it nearly tips over.) To make matters worse, Andrews never did hard-boiled very well. Although born in Mississippi, he was aces at milk-fed midwestern good guy roles, and his very best was in as the well-meaning sergeant Tyne in Lewis Milestone’s highly stylized and highly effective war film, A Walk in the Sun (1945). When he juts his jaw at Merrill and sneers at Brand, it doesn’t scare anyone. Noir has to be dark in more than photography. This doesn’t get it done. It’s interesting historically, though. It’s pre-Miranda, so suspects, and even material witnesses, have zero rights and recourse—sort of like life under the Patriot Act.

Paris
Land of Plenty (2004)—9/23/04
I have the sense that Wim Wenders’s new film has not yet opened commercially in the States, but after seeing it Thursday evening, I still cruised the web looking for reactions. I was disturbed to find that the few pieces on it—based apparently on its appearance at the Venice Film Festival and a few special screenings—turned almost entirely on the question, Is this film anti-American? This is the new litmus test for all entertainment that has any political reference points, and “anti-American” also seems to encompass anything that is critical of official American policy or the post-9/11 surge of aggressive patriotism (customarily taking the form of waving patriotic symbols). It’s the same sort of advance lather that’s being worked up to greet Philip Roth’s new novel, The Plot Against America, to be published in a week or so, even though Roth has written in The New York Times that he began to shape the novel in December 2000, and is writing about a period in American history some sixty years ago.
Wenders has returned repeatedly to America and American subjects over the years, and his critical observations have generally been accompanied by sympathetic perceptions and a certain admiration. Land of Plenty, its title (and much of its tone) drawn from the Leonard Cohen song which covers the final sequence of the film, is one of the first attempts from anywhere to give serious consideration to our post-9/11 predicament. As I saw the film, it does so by presenting us with two very different but ultimately congruent versions of ourselves. First, there is Paul Jeffries, a fiftyish veteran of Vietnam’s Special Forces, a man unhinged by the war and by Agent Pink (the more toxic parent of Agent Orange) who had only begun to settle down when the September atrocity struck. Now, his love of country and his pride in defending it with his life have sent him far off the tracks. He has appointed himself a private homeland security force, cruising about Los Angeles in his battered old van which is crammed with cameras, microphones, a laptop, and a .45—looking for, and therefore finding, things that look suspicious. To Paul, nothing looks more suspicious than a man wearing a turban.
But there is also his sister’s daughter, Lana, twenty, the child of missionaries who has grown up in Africa and the middle east, and has lately been living on the West Bank, where she has a Palestinian boy friend. Lana has seen the world, and the breadth of sufferings in it, seen how people view the US who live in countries most Americans could not find on a map. But she is also deeply spiritual, praying often and sincerely to a personal, providential God. She has come back to the US to work in a Los Angeles homeless mission run by a friend of her father’s, but mainly to deliver a letter from her mother to Paul, her uncle.
The way in which Paul and Lana connect imposes rather severe demands upon our power to suspend disbelief, but I don’t think Wenders is interested in either the plausibility of orthodox narrative or even in building conventionally believable characters. He is presenting temperaments, dimensions of our national personality, and letting them intermingle. And he lets them run free in an environment not customarily made central in our own films. The Los Angeles we see is mostly one of massive homelessness, whose hunger and despair are as much a part of the landscape as the freeways and the skyscrapers.
This kind of enterprise depends heavily on the central performances, and here Wenders has chosen well. John Diehl is Paul. He’s a face you recognize but can’t quite place, perhaps because he’s never had a film role beyond bit part or supporting character, and then rarely in big films (he passed through Pearl Harbor and Wenders used him in The End of Violence). His paranoid, driven character who sees sleeper cells everywhere and one-man submarines lurking under tarpaulins made me uncomfortable, nervous, a little frightened. I could have done without the obligatory Vietnam nightmare, but for the rest his work was mesmerizing. The film is worth seeing for him alone, though there are other reasons as well. Michelle Williams brought to Lana a sweetness, simplicity, and believable innocence that must be extremely difficult to portray convincingly in a post-cynical age of sneer and irony. She made it work.
In the end, with Cohen—North America’s answer to Edith Piaf, the voice of our yearnings, our consciences, our fears—on the soundtrack, Paul and Lana come to understand each other and to accept that they need each other. She needs his strength and protection (at least when he’s calmed down somewhat, as he does after at long last after seeing the folly of his thinking and also after opening his sister’s letter); he needs her quiet insistence that they should stop talking and listen for the voices of 9/11’s dead, because they would hear that the victims don’t want any others killed in their name. And he also needs to take up the responsibility of caring for her, rather than chasing phantoms.
Wenders doesn’t resolve, or try to resolve, our current dilemmas. He tries instead to get us to look closely at ourselves from one point of view, to see what we’re doing to ourselves and others, to incorporate other perspectives, and he wraps it all in a sort of lament--just like Cohen's song--for our country, with its incredible riches and its incredible poverty, material and spiritual. Like all his work that I’ve seen, there’s quirkiness and idiosyncrisy in it, some rough spots to get over. But I can’t get the film out of my mind, and that’s as strong a recommendation as I can make for taking in what the man has to say.

Paris
Inside Job (2004)--9/22/04
Nicolas Winding Refn is Danish, educated in New York, and the director of three or four films of which I’ve never heard. Well, so what: this one had John Turturro, so can it go that far wrong? In a word: yes. Turturro plays Harry Caine, a security guard at a Wisconsin mall, whose wife was recently one of two victims in a shooting at the mall’s underground parking lot. Naturally, Refn has watched a little too much Antonioni and DePalma, so we get a lot of reviewing of the mall’s video systems and scratching for clues, blurry photos pinned to the wall. Henry James was addressing writers when he advised, “Tell the dream, lose the reader,” but it’s a good guideline for directors too. But hey, Refn knows a lot more than Henry James about storytelling and plunges—deeply—into Harry’s (rather predictable) dreams, hallucinations, imaginings.
I suppose you could say that what I’m about to do is spoiling, but Refn got at this film first—along with Hubert Selby, Jr., who collaborated on the script with him—he spoiled it good and proper before I came along. Probes of Harry’s psyche, of which there are a number, are prefaced by black and red pulsing abstractions which look like those visualization of fractals we used to see fifteen or twenty years ago. They go on forever. Long before we get to the last one, it’s pretty plain that all of this is going on in Harry’s mind, and when the killer shoots him toward the end, there’s no killer and no shooting. Ho hum.
Along the way, which seems much lengthier than the film’s actual 91 minutes, Refn forces a style of massive pauses which makes Pinter’s work look like His Girl Friday (1940). Everyone seems to be on ‘ludes or massive doses of Valium. For instance:
“What was his name?” Very long pause.
“His name?” Longer pause.
“Yes.” Practically intermission—plenty of time to go out for pizza.
“I don’t know.”
It’s slightly jolting to discover that Turturro has been around for twenty-five years now; his first role was uncredited, in Raging Bull. He didn’t make much of an impression on me until Five Corners (1985), a pretty fair little indie with Jody Foster and Tim Robbins, and especially Do the Right Thing (1987), still Spike Lee’s best. There, his playing of Pino was so convincing that I thought, Oh my, this young man is going to get typed as working-class ethnic—a sort of outer-borough redneck—and never get another kind of part. How pleased I was to see that Miller’s Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), Quiz Show (1994), A Box of Moonlight (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), Cradle Will Rock (1999), and The Luzhin Defense (2000), to name some of my favorite roles, proved me wrong.

Paris
The General (1927)—9/18/04
In Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2004), the young American and the young Frenchman have one of their passionate, well-informed, and revealing arguments, this one about the superiority of Chaplin (the French view) or Keaton (the American preference). Chaplin has the vote of posterity, of course, and as I have begun to work my way through the eight-DVD collection of his features and many shorts, it’s hard to deny him the nod. It’s a towering achievement. But don’t think that gives anyone the right to dismiss Buster. I admire Chaplin’s work, of course, but I really like Keaton’s. Work like Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1925), and the great run of five films he had from 1926 through 1928—The Battling Butler (1926), College (1927), The General (1927), Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), and The Camerman (1928)—will stand up to the best of silent comedy. He had a hand in directing all of these, often uncredited, and generally worked on the scripts as well.
The pinnacle of his achievement was The General. His success had earned him the right to a big budget (for the time) and considerable freedom. Over the years, it has shown up on television now and then, abundant in its riches, but the small screen cramps its visual style, which is expansive, and a poor print was distracting. Now, MK2, the French film distributors and producers, have used advanced techniques to remove spots and scratches, restore the original contrasts, get the movement more in synch with modern twenty-four-frame-a-second technology, and have also added a new orchestral sound track by the Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi, which is good when it’s good but does rather go on.
My own preference for Keaton over Chaplin is that Charlie, who was hopelessly sentimental, also never passed up an opportunity to do schtick. Often, it’s a delight—think of the absurd and very funny singing sequence toward the end of Modern Times—but it’s still schtick. Keaton avoided that temptation, if he ever had it, preferring to get laughs out of situations tightly integrated into the story. Essentially, he did character comedies, and I find them especially rewarding. In The General, set in Georgia during the Civil War, young Johnny Gray is the engineer on a train called “The General,” and when he goes to enlist for the Confederacy and is turned down (he’s more valuable on the railroad), his girlfriend tells him she won’t speak to him until she sees him in uniform. He wanders back to the tracks in a funk and takes a seat on the connecting rod between the big front wheels. Someone gets in the locomotive and starts it up, and it creeps off, lifting Johnny up and down, up and down. It’s a funny shot, but even more a beautiful one, because Johnny never notices what’s happening, so sunk in sadness is he, and the movement also mimics the highs and lows of his relationship with his girlfriend.
A good half of the film is devoted to a chase, and Keaton gets more out of it while keeping himself working within a strict story line than you can imagine. But there’s also a spectacular train wreck, a big battle scene, and every sort of reversal. Keaton got the sobriquet of The Great Stone Face because he never cracked a smile, but here nothing could be more appropriate: Johnny is a man on a mission (get back his stolen train, get back his girl), thoroughly applied to business, and refusing to relent until he’s successful. I’m assuming the new print will be released soon in the states; if it does, make a special effort—even if you’ve seen the film. Guaranteed to satisfy.
In the mid-1930s, Keaton took a big contract with MGM, and of course they reamed him, taking away control and essentially extinguishing his creative spark (although booze played a substantial role as well). After a long string of forgettables, and World War II, he was limited to bit parts and cameos (although he did get the role of Calvero’s partner in Chaplin’s Limelight [1952]), the last of which was in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), which was released just after his death.

Paris
Vivacious Lady (1938)—9/17/04
It’s not the most original plot in history, but George Stevens manages to wring every last laugh out of it. College professor from New England school comes to New York, falls in love over night with nightclub chanteuse; they marry, take the morning train back to Old Sharon, where he suddenly finds it extremely difficult to tell all to his imperious father, president of the college, and mother, sweet but with a “weak heart” (she requires smelling salts at the slightest upset). And that’s the story. Every conceivable barrier springs up between the professor and his parents, most of them erected by the college president, some by circumstances. Not much to it, but the scenes are mostly played well, and sometimes brilliantly.
Ginger Rogers is Francey, the singer smitten with her professor, James Stewart. The college president is Charles Coburn, who does a little bit too much of the dropping-the-monocle business, but is otherwise all right. (In one scene, from the nightclub, Stewart is calling his father from the coat check phone. He turns to the coat check girl and says, “He’s the president, you know.” She says, “Oh yeah? Then what’s Roosevelt.” Nice look at academic self-referentiality.) Rogers always had a terrific way with snappy dialogue, and if you ever get to watch a terrific little B movie from the end of her career, Tight Spot (1955), pounce. Stewart was always good at comedy, but here he also exudes come romantic charm, and they pair well. But the real joy is is mother, played by the seemingly always late-middle-aged Beulah Bondi, who demonstrates a smile that will melt you on a face that doesn’t seem to give up smiles easily, an enormous charm, an ability to let down her starchy exterior and shake her butt. Literally: she, Rogers, and James Ellison, who plays Stewart’s best friend and cousin, do “The Big Apple,” and Rogers gamely tones down her steps so as not to show up her fellow players—she was, after all, the greatest female dancer in film musical history, Cyd Charisse or no Cyd Charisse. James Ellison, by the way, got his start as the young, impulsive sidekick in the Hopalong Cassidy movies of the early-to-mid 1930s, essentially the same role that Clint Eastwood had in the “Rawhide” series of the early and middle 1960s. Needless to say, it didn’t take Ellison quite as far as it took Eastwood.
In addition, there are three of the great ones who filled small roles in 1930s comedies but who, when you saw their name in the opening credits, guaranteed that you would have a good time. Grady Sutton: the chunky botany instructor here, he has a great moment flirting with Rogers, another when, in front of the class, Stewart says to him, “Mr. Culpepper, I believe you are from Texas.” Sutton stands before answering, and says, “I am, and bless her.” Franklin Pangborn: liberated from his customary department store floorwalker role, he becomes a receptionist in a woman’s hotel, and strolls off with every scene he’s in. Willie Best: consigned to the sorts of roles reserved for black men in the ‘30s (waiters, porters, busboys, etc.), he gets involved in an indescribable scene between Bondi and Rogers which adds just the right condiment to the dish.
Not available on DVD or VCR, I’m told, but once in a (great) while popping up on TCM. It’s not The More the Merrier (1944), Stevens’s best comedy, but it’s worth ninety minutes.

Paris
A Woman’s Secret (1949)—9/16/04
A lot of film lovers go all squishy when Nicholas Ray’s name comes up and start talking about Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without A Cause (1955), and 55 Days at Peking (1963) as though they were The Searchers (1956), Fist in the Pocket (I Pugni i Tasci, 1965), and 1900 (1976), three films of roughly comparable subject matter but vastly, incomparably superior achievement. It is this sort of sentimentality that apparently convinced some distributor to unearth one of Ray’s early RKO films, along with a couple of others, by Jacques Tourneur and George Stevens, spring for new prints, and re-release them. I saw the Ray, A Woman’s Secret (1949), which was weak for the most part, but with a couple of redeeming moments.
It’s a drawing room comedy wrapped in a murder mystery, but the wrapping is so thin and predictable from the first few minutes of the film that all the interest goes to the comedy: we know exactly how the “mystery” is going to be resolved, but the snappy repartée, scripted by Herman J. Mankiewicz (who wrote Citizen Kane), keeps us hanging in there. The patter is delivered by some real pros, such as Melvyn Douglas, Jay C. Flippen, Mary Phillips, and Emory Parnell (who as a desk sergeant encapsulates Central Casting’s conception of Irish Copness). We also have Gloria Graham, Ray’s wife at the time, doing her (oft-repeated) bad girl number and Victory Jory, only a few years past all those down-market westerns as the black hat guy, cast as, well, lovers. Hooo, boy. Finally, there’s Maureen O’Hara, as the female lead, and utterly unconvincing. She never did anything I’ve seen worth paying for that wasn’t under John Ford’s direction, this included.
It was Ray’s second film, after diddling around in New York theater in the 1930s, and he was still learning his craft. But while he got better at things fumbled here—story holes, muffed master shots, details that get stated one way and contradicted a couple of scenes later—I’m not convinced he ever got all that good. Entertainment Weekly, in one of those supremely meaningless lists a few years back, ranked him as the thirty-sixth greatest director of all time. I’m reminded of a fellow I worked with at a large New York bank about twenty years ago. He was an upper-middle-level executive who was, how shall I put this, excused after perhaps a dozen years of service. He took a job across the Hudson with a big Newark insurance company, and upon departing bragged to his colleagues, “I’m going over as their Number Seventeen Man.”

Paris
The Chase (1966)—9/14/04
For a brief period in the late 1960s, from Bonnie and Clyde (1967) through the following year’s Alice’s Restaurant to Little Big Man (1970), Arthur Penn fever was running high. It broke shortly thereafter, and he has made only a sprinkling of films, none of them memorable for excellence. The Chase may be his worst, though, a muddled mess with almost nothing to recommend it. To begin with, it really isn’t about a chase—nobody really goes after escaped con whom everyone calls “Bubber” except his wife, who calls him “Bubba.” Don’t ask. Instead, the film is about the conflicts, jealousies, racism, sexual infidelities, and power structure of a smallish Texas town. These are played out in excruciating detail, with rednecks in business suits a’ whompin’ on black folk, and black folk bearing it all with non-violent resolve. A sheriff gets in between, earns himself a fat lip and worse, but triumphs. There’s star power here, but it blinks dimly: Brando is the sheriff, dull and lifeless and with a hoked up accent; Redford is Bubber in a role that was supposed to make him a star, but mostly featured him running through swamps, so he had to wait until his Sundance turn a few years later; Jane Fonda is his wife, in another sex-kitten role from her earlier years; and there’s Robert Duvall as a wimp, the reassuring Angie Dickinson as the sheriff’s wife, Janice Rule as a slut, and the wildly miscast E.G. Marshall as a Texas oil and land tycoon. Take all steps to avoid.

Paris
Salvador Allende (2004)—9/9/04
Patricio Guzmán is a Chilean filmmaker who (as I understand it) went into exile after the 1973 coup and has made some films about the Pinochet dictatorship, and now this one about the Allende regime and coup. It’s made with passion and devotion, and there are things in it that moved me, so I hate to come down negatively, but I must. Three reasons, in ascending order of importance: (1) it’s too long by about fifteen or twenty minutes, which risks sapping important moments of its power; (2) it’s vague about the contemporary situation—that is, he has a Michael Moore-like scene where he tries to interview people in present-day Santiago about the September 11, 1973, takeover, and they all refuse to come on camera, but then he’s allowed to film inside the presidential palace and the official presidential residence, so it’s hard to say how squeamish or controlling today’s authorities are about Chile’s history; (3) most serious, he drops the ball when it comes to getting responsibility for the coup clear and unmistakable. I’ll stick to the last point, after saying that those touching scenes were fairly powerful—the newsreel footage from 1970-73 showing the authentic adulation of Allende by the Chilean people, or at least the ones photographed, and the wrenching interviews with old United Party militants who blamed themselves and their comrades for failing to come to Allende’s aid on September 11 and, I think, are suffering serious survivors’ guilt.
Unquestionably, significant parts of the Chilean economic elites, upper middle classes, and (needless to say) officer corps were dead set against Allende’s land reforms, nationalizations, and redistribution of wealth. (There is one particularly effective scene, historical footage of a landlord—reluctantly, he admits—turning over his land to the peasants in 1973. The stunned beamings on their faces made the overlong film worth it.) Castro himself told Allende, as Guzmán notes, that if he didn’t clean out the military and put his own people in, he would be overthrown. But would the military have moved if it hadn’t known, in commitments of one syllable words, that the US not only wanted Allende out, Nixon insisted on it. There are several interview clips here with Edward Korry, who was ambassador to Chile during the years under review. He is engagingly candid about the fact that the CIA sent weapons and money by diplomatic pouch to Chile in 1970 to be used in killing pro-Allende General Schneider, but later launches into the tired old refrain, completely refuted decades ago, about Allende wanting to institute a “Marxist-Leninist regime.” That’s a lie, and so what if it were true? It was their country. But not for long. Allende’s death and, more important, the death of Chilean social democracy, was somehow overlooked at the tongue-bath given Nixon by all those ex-presidents back in the 1990s, and I suspect it won’t be mentioned at Kissinger’s obsequies (which can’t come soon enough for me).
The US has been treating Central and South America as private possessions for very nearly 200 years—since the Monroe Doctrine. Nothing lasts long there that doesn’t conform to US reigning ideology and corporate interests, which have for a very long time seen the rest of this hemisphere as a source of cheap raw materials and a nice market for US-produced goods. It’s a stunningly arrogant record, and Salvador Allende owed it to its eponymous hero and his supporters to tell it like it is.

Paris
Ae. . .Fond Kiss(2004)—9/7/04
I first became aware of Ken Loach in 1973, when a friend suggested I show Kes (1969) in a film series I was running at the University of Missouri. The film bombed—people walked out in groups—but I loved it. Loach was born in 1936 in England, and has made more than twenty films for theatrical release and a few dozen more for British television. I don’t know what’s more impressive about him, his talent as a filmmaker or his integrity and dedication to his principles. His films are about social issues from a gentle but firm, and in no way shrill, left-wing perspective: poverty, class conflict, racism, bigotry and intolerance, religious persecution, union-busting, alcoholism and its consequences, homelessness, revolutionary politics—all the things that make the world go round. Almost all set among the working classes, a novelty for viewers in the states, who are encouraged to wallow in their classless fantasy by the lords of movies and television. But Loach has found his subject, and he sticks to it, God love him. I’ve seen roughly a dozen of his films and liked them all. The easiest to pick up in the US (by now, you should have grasped that US distributors are not all that enthusiastic about buying Loach films, and although I wasn’t in the country, I gather that the Republican National Convention didn’t show any during their sessions) are the utterly glorious Land and Freedom (1995), a heart-rending story about a British volunteer in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, starring the very, very talented Ian Hart, and Bread and Roses (2000), about organizing immigrant workers in Los Angeles, starring Adrien Brody. These and others occasionally show up on television film channels. Seize.
Kes, still one of my favorite films by anyone, deals with a desperately poor working-class family in the north of England at the end of the sixties. The boy captures and adopts a kestrel (a variety of hawk), trains it, gets the only spark of happiness available to him from his relationship with Kes, only to have his brute of an old brother kill it. End of film. Loach is famous for working in dialects of the UK where the people don’t sound much like Jeremy Irons or Diana Rigg. The people in Kes are hard to understand (in Riff Raff [1990], Loach used so many impenetrable local dialects that he was obliged to issue the film with subtitles in the UK). Loach has a clever device to get around the problem. In the film’s first scene, he looks over the shoulder of the protagonist-boy as he reads a comic strip to himself aloud. We see the words on the page, we hear him pronounce them, we get the idea. Within a couple of minutes, we’re in the groove and there’s no problem.
Ae . . . Fond Kiss is his newest, and a beauty. Set, like Loach's My Name is Joe (1998) and Sweet Sixteen (2002), in Glasgow—another slightly challenging dialect—it tells a story of religious, cultural, and racial complexity. Glasgow has a Pakistani community going back to just shortly after the Indian-Pakistani community (1947), so there are full-blooded Pakistanis there speaking English in a Glaswegian accent and feeling themselves fully Pakistani, fully Scottish, fully Muslim, fully Christian—and rabid Glasgow Ranger (football [soccer]) supporters. Casim